3.6 Notes

Support was added for MYSQL_TYPE_GEOMETRY
to the MySQLi extension in PHP 5.3.

Note there are different internal implementations within
libmysqlclient and
mysqlnd for handling columns of type
MYSQL_TYPE_GEOMETRY. Generally speaking,
mysqlnd will allocate significantly less
memory. For example, if there is a POINT
column in a result set, libmysqlclient may
pre-allocate up to 4GB of RAM although less than 50 bytes are
needed for holding a POINT column in
memory. Memory allocation is much lower, less than 50 bytes,
if using mysqlnd.